Adam Pearce (18:08)
Well, I've actually got to credit the suggestion to somebody else. I was having a conversation with Michael Everson, who is maybe familiar to some listeners as the publisher of various versions of the, of the Hobbit, particularly in various other languages, and which he casually mentioned kind of the. The opportunity to kind of use different sort of alternatives in translations to, To. To the rooms. And when he sort of did that kind of something tweaked in my mind and I thought, hang on a minute, I don't want to use Anglo Saxon Romans in a book about Welsh. That would be like. That would be the biggest sort of most inappropriate the use of. So it wasn't, it wasn't his suggestion that I use Colborne above. The idea of using kind of, you know, you know, the Anglo Saxons in particular were at war with the Welsh for a very, very long time. You know, they still are. You know, the, the relationship between England and Wales is. Is, you know, of course fraught with all sorts of, you know, social and political sort of baggage. So, you know, you know, Anglo Saxon wounds is kind of. It was. Would never have sat right in Welsh anyway. The amount of work it took to, To. To actually put it into K was probably actually less work than recreating the Anglo Saxon runes would have been because. Because I would have had to kind of re. You know, rearrange, you know, translate the actual content of the writing into Welsh anyway. So actually when you're doing that, it's, it's. It's actually fairly simple to just change the shape of the runes. Cobran looks actually nothing like sort of Anglo Saxon runes. It looks very rune like. It's very sort of angular, very, very much. It looks like the kind of thing that a dwarf would hack, would carve into a rock, you know, so it looks kind of really appropriate, I think. But it is the individual letters, I don't think any of them are actually the same, same as an equivalent letter in, you know, in Anglo Saxon rooms at all. So they are totally different. It's an interesting. And a bit of a weird sort of sort of historical oddity that the Alphabet, it's basically a forgery. It's not authentic. It's not a real runic Alphabet at all in the sense that it was never written by kind of ancient Welsh bards as people claimed it was. It's believed. I mean, you know, the evidence is a bit kind of dubious about exactly where it came from, but it's believed have been the. The brainchild of the notorious forger Yolom of Ganog, who invented a lot of what are now sort of annual traditions as part of the rush Istadvod, particularly the National Estadvod. A lot of things which he kind of claimed were based on sort of ancient Druidic ceremonies, but probably he mostly just made up coil bread is exactly like that. You know, it was actually really fashionable for a period in the sort of 19th century. People would kind of carve their own gravestones with it, thinking that they were resurrecting this ancient, ancient written language. But there's no, there's no evidence of its kind of appearing before he sort of suddenly, very suspiciously discovers it. You know, it's so, so, you know, it's almost certainly his invention, a pure, pure invention of yarn or gallop. So, you know, in that sense it's, you know, it's a fantasy Alphabet, which makes it entirely appropriate, I would argue, for a fantasy novel. And like I said, you know, the, you know, I mean, if you look at the, you know, if anyone just takes a look at the runes, they still look like runes. They still look very much like something a dwarf would carve. They don't look kind of out of place really. And Anglo Saxon runes have kind of always been a really weird thing to have in the Hobbit anyway, because they're a real world script. They're not like, you know, if Tolkien had invented a script and used that in the Hobbit, then I wouldn't have touched it. I would have, wouldn't have chased it, you know, because it would have been sort of a sort of authentic, you know, Tolkien ism that I would have felt the need to preserve. So, but, but it didn't. It's just, it's, it's got nothing to do with Middle Earth and it's no more, it's no more kind of appropriate really to use that than, than any other, any other writing system really, except that they say that they're runes, so you, you assume, therefore, that they're carving them on things, right? Cardran ticks all of those boxes whilst being something that's Welsh and being something that's interesting and being something that's, that's, you know, got me at least five minutes on a podcast. So, you know, it's, you know, it's, we wanted to. I was aware, when I was aware that there were going to be people who would be interested in this book, who wouldn't be able to read the book. So I wanted to put something in for them as well that would be kind of interesting for the people who collect, and I know that they exist, the people who collect every different version of Retalking book that exists, that they have something that they can say, well, this is, this is a unique thing about this one that makes different, rather than it simply being a translation. And.
